This paper describes recent developments in the Italian industrial system and investigates the main factors affecting its competitiveness. Our analysis provides a picture of widespread weaknesses. Production levels in all industries are lower than those before the crisis; with the exception of...

Recent studies warn that the U.S. economy may return to a phase of secular stagnation. In the next 20 to 50 years, U.S. economic growth will be negatively affected by lower contributions of hours worked and education. But some studies also add that productivity could decelerate sharply and that...

In this paper we estimate the long-run relationship between regional total factor productivity, R&D, human capital and public infrastructure between 1980 and 2001. We take advantage of recent developments panel cointegration techniques that control for endogeneity of regressors to estimate...

Endogenous growth has set a new paradigm for macroeconomic analysis. This paper overviews the most relevant theoretical contributions of this literature for the analysis of open economies, highlighting their implications both for the effects of crosscountry integration on output convergence and...

We conduct a regional analysis of the relationship between market concentration and price dynamics in the grocery retail sector, focusing on a sample of five categories of goods belonging to the 12 COICOP aggregation and on a panel of countries that includes Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy,...

In response to fundamental changes in regulation and technology, the financial industry around the world is undergoing an unprecedented wave of consolidation. A growing body of empirical literature has attempted to measure the efficiency gains from M&As; however there is little sense of how the...

The general conclusion of the empirical literature is that in-market consolidation generates adverse price changes, harming consumers. Previous studies, however, look only at the short-run pricing impact of consolidation, ignoring all effects that take longer to materialize. Using a database...

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in explaining the relative small average size of Italian firms. We construct a simple model that shows that the smooth relation between size and growth probability is disturbed in proximity of the thresholds at which EPL applies...

We address the question in the title using survey-based measures of financial constraints, as opposed to the proxies typically used in the literature. We find that in our dataset of Italian firms, those declaring to be financially constrained are smaller and younger than the others. However, the...